eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

August 2014

08/31/2014

Basically, a day in the life of a large public university in California. We get to sit in on budget meetings, student protests, administrative meetings responding to said protests, English classes, Economics classes, Astronomy classes, Sociology classes, Drama productions, and Management seminars. We get to watch the janitors do their work, the construction workers do their work, the student recruitment office do its work, and the college Chancellor do his work (He lectures the faculty chairs against sending him proposals for faculty tenure that do not deserve it among other things). You see students lounging, organizing, studying, attending classes, playing Frisbee, and riding bikes to school. You can hear the sounds of students demanding that their educations remain free in California and you can here financial accountants wrestling with the fact that the State will not be returning to former days of public largess in that regard. One senses that the institution plans to continue serving the middle class by recruiting the upper class kids of upper class foreigners and offering its students as paying researchers for American corporations and the Federal Government willing to pay public universities to do research that they intend to benefit from. It is an interesting model, really. I suspect that it is cheaper to pay a university to have student do research than to pay graduated researchers.

The University of California at Berkeley has done something interesting in producing this “documentary” (there are no voice-overs). It is basically saying, “This is who we are.” It is hard for me to say if a high school junior or senior will see this and say “That is the best place for me to go and learn.” I suspect that I would enjoy a different model of learning but maybe that is because I feel all “been there and done that” about college these days?

Question for Comment: If you had a full scholarship to go back to college right now, what would you study and where?

08/13/2014

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of the Right and Left by Yuval Levin REVIEW

Somewhere in the Continental Divide between British Columbia and Alberta is a creek that forks into two branches. One goes down to the Atlantic via the Hudson Bay. The other flows into the Pacific. Someday, I think it would be fun to stand on a rock at the fork and determine which direction a few gallons of water go.

Ever wonder where the divide between the political “right” and the “left” came from? Yuval Levin tries to trace the roots of contemporary political controversies into the arguments of two men in the late 18th century (Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke). The author asserts that he hopes to explain the origins of the left-right divide in ways that the two sides would agree with and I would like to think that he succeeded. I found myself seeing both sides as having credible arguments anyway.

Though the book goes into Burke and Paine’s various differences on subjects as diverse as their views on nature, society, reason, political institutions, freedom, equality, rights, and the French Revolution, the primary divide seems to be … drumroll please … their views on what role the past should play in the present. Yuval describes the two men as “two kinds of liberals.” One he says is a reforming conservative (Burke) and the other is a restoring progressive (Paine). Burke believes in respecting the past and what it has bequeathed to us and seeks only to modify it before handing it down to the next generation. Paine believes that every generation deserves to recreate the world as though they were the first people to inhabit it. In short, they disagree about the authority of the past in present life. There was a sign outside the hardware store in Woodstock the other day that said, "Don't look back - you're not going that way." Both Paine and Burke insisted that people had to look back to create a present but to different antecedents (the near and distant past or the original past).

Burke was a reformer but sought to strike a balance between stability (which he valued most) and change (which he valued least). He insisted that while reform was inevitable and even desirable, it should never come at the cost of a preserved consistency. For Burke, good reform was reform that looked back at all the traditions accumulated by one’s society over time and in appreciating it, changing only what was egregiously malfunctioning. One should never throw out the work of generations of one’s ancestors lightly. Things should be kept unless proven untrue. And sometimes even then, they should be kept if they worked.

Thomas Paine, by contrast, valued the freedom to create a society based on reason, not on tradition or superstition. When he looked back, he looked only to the original state of nature and discarded all that came between then and the present. He would discard all that was not self-evidently true. He believed that human beings owed nothing to the traditions of ancestors and were cowards or dupes if they laid down their lives at the alters of the dead. Paine was not formally educated and spent precious little time referring to ancient models for his blueprints for society today. “I neither read books nor studied other people’s opinions,” he wrote, “I thought for myself” and at another time, “I scarcely ever quote. The reason is, I think.” Thomas Jefferson put it well when he commented once that Paine “thought more than he read.” Nevertheless, Thomas Paine was a powerful writer and a formidable force of persuasion. “Paine could bring even modestly educated readers into contact with profound philosophical questions” says Levin and no arguments were more central to his message than this one: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

From this starting point, the two “rivers” divided. Paine would argue that all a human being needed to construct an ideal society was reason; The less precedent, the better. Burke insisted that human beings were not entirely rational and that, on the whole, societies would fall apart without religion, tradition, and the force of multi-generational conditioning. “The influence of reason is not as extensive as it is commonly believed” Burke argued. Burke insists that the stock of wisdom in each man is small. Thus, it is best for us to rely on a collective wisdom of generations. “We ought not to follow our own fancies …” he writes, “Rather to believe that we are dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.” Large communities thinking for generations over time should be trusted more than our own puny individual theories of the moment.

Both men believed that the American and French Revolutions could be cited to prove their respective points.

Burke argued that England had lost its American colonies because Paliament and the king had not paid due respect to the tradition of rights that had been developed over centuries. He argued in his most famous pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, that the French Revolution had turned violent and self-destructive precisely because its leaders had destroyed all of the traditions and sentimental ties that had held French society together while the American Revolution had succeeded because it had maintained, after the revolution, so much of what it had inherited from England. Paine on the other hand argued that the Americans had betrayed their revolution during the years after the war and he insisted that the French Revolution had failed because it had, under Napoleon, simply re-adopted old models of tyranny rather than going back all the way to nature for its principles.

If Parliament had not thrown away years of tradition and pursued ideological extremism in their colonies, they would still have them, Burke argued. “You began ill because you began by despising everything that belonged to you,” he says to the French. Paine countered. If France had been willing to live out its ideals, there never would have been a Napoleon. According to Burke, we owe the future the accumulated wisdom of the past. Not freedom. This is how leaders of the French Revolution had failed their people. According to Paine, the Federalists had simply brought back the monarchy into American life and that is how Washington’s administration had failed the American people.

On the subject of religion, the two men could not have been more different. To Paine, a religion was something that served society and stability. It was a cultural tradition that could not be attacked without severe consequences to the society it served. Paine on the other hand, was born into a Quaker family but surrendered any and all belief in any faith that was not based on reason alone. (“If God had consulted the Quakers in the creation, all the world’s flowers would be gray,” he said.) “When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be a revelation,” Paine famously argues in Age of Reason, “The creation is the Bible of the Deist … all other Bibles and Testaments are forgeries.” Whether he had read it or not, Paine was echoing the argument made by Ethan Allen in his 1785 Reason: The Only Oracle of Man.

On the subject of government, the two men took opposing ground. Burke insisted that it was a government’s job to guard the traditions that allowed them to evolve. Government owed it to the future to preserve that about the past that worked to the people’s benefit. A government was not an organization delegated with the task of experimenting with theories. It was a trust tasked with keeping the lives of people stable and ever improving. In Paine’s Rights of Man, this notion of the sacredness of tradition was frontally assaulted. Written in 1791, Paine’s Rights of Man was the answer to Burkes’ Reflections. Paine argued there that a government’s job was to express the will of the people in its generation. In a democracy of reasoning people, the government should express the will of the people living, tradition be damned.

Paine’s is a politics of applied principle and he believes the only thing to do with governments based on bad principle is to tear them down and rebuild. Thus he spent most of his life and work tearing things down. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he had written in Common Sense and there he opposed the right of any generation to impose its will on another through governmental laws, hereditary power, or irrevocable Constitutions. Paine suggested that all laws should contain sunset clauses that would render them null and void within thirty years unless the subsequent generation re-approved them. Why should anyone contort themselves to fit into molds not of their own making?

While Burke insisted that hereditary power and aristocracy was essential to stable society, Paine decried the whole notion of monarchies and nobilities as foolish. “What would we think,” he asks, “if the only people allowed to write novels or paint pictures had to be the sons of those who had written and painted in the last generation?” We don’t inherit talent. Governing, he said, was no different. Governing was not so complicated that each generation’s gifted leaders could not do it, regardless of their birth.

Paine’s belief that each generation came into the world free by right from the decisions of all previous generations, emphasized the vital importance of freedom and choice. He insisted that the State had a responsibility to give each citizen in his or her generation an equal opportunity to succeed. For that reason, he favored policies of wealth distribution, progressive income taxes, free education, and communal ownership of land. Society, says Paine is there to allow people to accomplish what they have the right but not the ability to accomplish. No one deserves to start out with more advantages than their merits entitle them to. In contrast, Burke insists that society benefits when some people are enabled to spend their lives in study preparing for public service. Governing, he says requires that someone be given the necessary time to study the past and the traditions of the culture he wishes to govern. He argues that England had developed an aristocratic class for good reason and that abolishing it in favor of a government of the mediocre middle was a foolish application of theory with no pragmatic benefit.

The earth is the common property of the human race according to Paine. It should be the value of the improvement only that should belong to the person. Paine would charge “ground rent” all those who use a portion of the earth to succeed. It would be a tax on property redistributed to all as though all owned a share in the collective. Every man is a co-owner in the whole planet and should only profit more from the work that they invest on the commons. They should not be entitled to the profit of their work and private ownership of what was the property of all by right.

To Paine, the nobility was an institution that no reasoning society would tolerate. “Social hierarchies have no natural foundation” he wrote. “Men are all of one degree … every child born into the world derives his existence from God.” “The world is as new to him as it was to the first man …” Paine refused to believe that he was born to cow-tow to the son of some Baron Von Stuffypants just because some ancient Stuffypants ancestor wanted it that way. He saw the “hereditary principle” as the root of all evil, says Levin.

It is not hard to see how the two men will differ about nature as well. For Paine, nature it is at its finest before it has been tampered with and organized by human interference. As we find nature, so we should enjoy it. And so should we leave it to our children and their children after them. It is not ours to corrupt and destroy. Paine accepts the Romantic notion espoused by Rousseau and later by the Hudson River School artists who saw nature most beautiful when it was most wild. For Burke, “nature” was in its ideal state when it was refined and tamed. Think “English garden” or Versailles, not Bierstadt painting. Burke insists that pursuing some ideal of perfect nature is bound to do violence to the world as it is. We can and should make things reasonably better, he insists. We can never make them “perfect.”

Ultimately, Burke thought in terms of duties and believed that it was crucial to a society to educate its youth to accept them and hand them down to posterity as duties. Conversely, Paine thought in terms of rights and thought it crucial to defend them and hand them down unrestricted. Paine insisted that the French were fighting for their rights and that people in England should demand theirs. Burke scoffed at this sophistry and insisted that England was happy with the rights they had already. “In England we have not yet been completely emboweled of our natural entrails,” he said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France,

“we still feel within us, and we still cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals... We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosom”

Burke sees danger in Paine’s demand for total equality. Equality is an unachievable goal to Burke. It had taken hundreds of years to develop a system that could retain the loyalties of all classes in English society, unequal as they were by ature, and Burke feared that Paine’s idealism would destroy the delicate balance. “Those who attempt to level, never equalize,” he wrote. For Burke a society of inequity has been built so that nature’s inequalities can coexist in a functioning society. Trying to destroy that for some idealized vision of a fictitious “natural equality” would only destroy a society that would never and could never produce an equality of men. “We do not have the power to make the world over again” Burke insists. We are born into families and families are born to us. We do not choose these commitments. We simply must accept the duties that come with the office. We are not born free to choose as Paine insists. We are born into social duties that have, in a sense, chosen us.

“Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things. Men come in that manner into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation.”

Almost everything Burke believes flows out of this.

For Burke believed in controlled change carefully pursued as a result of felt need. His model is the legal profession. Innovations are presented as modest enlargements of precedent and thoughtful lawyers and judges minimize social disruption by incremental improvement of the law. Paine’s paradigm for change was the revolution. Like Elijah, Paine wanted to see change come in an earthquake, a whirlwind, and a conflagration. One day Baal worship. The next day Yahweh. Burke thought change was best initiated in the still, small, imperceptible voice. We can know if something is working only when we try it, he argues. We can’t always know if an idea is correct in advance. So why risk the confidence of the people in “schemes” that may or may not better their lives?

“He that sets his house on fire because his fingers are frostbitten,” Burke insists, “can never be a fit instructor in the method of providing our habitations with a cheerful and salutary warmth.”

Amended wrongs do not make something right, Paine retorts. “Time with respect to principles is an eternal now.” His is a politics of the present. “It is the living and not the dead that are to be accommodated in political life.”

“There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

John Quincy Adams kept a running narrative of the Burke Paine debate in American newspapers and that debate, as it tuens out, was at the heart of the spiteful party acrimony between the Jeffersonaian Republicans (something like today’s Democrats) and Federalists (something like today’s Republicans). Burke and Paine forced each other to get to the core of their differences and they were discussed everywhere in America in 200 years ago.

And the debate goes on. Should we redefine marriage? Should we radically alter the education system in light of new technologies? Should we borrow money that our children must pay off? Should we advocate for democratic revolutions in the Middle East? Should we overhaul the healthcare system or merely tweak the present system? Should we raise inheritance taxes and property taxes and use it for social welfare programs? Should we radically rethink settled questions of when life begins and ends? Should we adopt foreign languages in our schools? Should we try to regulate corporations or just deprive them of the status of personhood that they have had for 200 years? Should courts actively pursue “progress” or faithfully preserve precedent?

08/12/2014

“They couldn’t organize a two car parade.” - Paul Bremmer on the inability of Iraqi leaders to organize a pluralistic government in Iraq.

“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine,” Thomas Paine wrote,

“He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

There are few decisions in history that are wrecking more havoc on the world than Muhammad’s decision to wed tribalism with religion. That is just my opinion. “He wanted to normalize Iraq when it is a country that is not normal,” says one of the diplomats interviewed of President George Bush in this Frontline piece on what is happening in Iraq.

When I look at what is going on in Iraq today, I am both not surprised and mystified. What makes these people (the Shiite Prime minister Malaki or the Sunni Islamic State in the Levant) think that Iraq stands to be improved by this return to sectarian Russian Roulette. Sigh. Honestly, when America decides to dig up George Washington’s bones and clone him for Prime ministers, then maybe we should go back to nation building in the Middle East.

At some point in time, these monotheistic religions are going to have to realize that Adam and Eve were neither Shiite, Sunni, Baptist, Catholic, Deist, Buddhist, Daoist, Jain, Hindu, or whatever I am.

As for American foreign policy in the region. My take is this. For decades, America has been rushing in to stop sectarian violence before it gets too out of hand. In a sense, people in this part of the world seem to have come to expect it. Perhaps they think they can afford to push for all they can for their tribes in the belief that the U.S. will come in and stop their opponents from pushing back even harder. I don’t know that has served their interests for us to do that.

As for this Caliph-slash-pirate, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, I would suggest that you find a single town or even better, an island, and see if you can build a Wahabi State there – the Islamic State of Al-Baghdadibad if you want to call it that - a “city set on a hill” if you will – that anyone would actually want to live in. Because the only thing I see that you know how to actually CREATE by way of civilization or happiness are corpses and blown up buildings.

Question for Comment: Was the U.S. Government right to leave Iraq before Shiites and Sunnis there learned to sing Kum Ba Ya together? Have we concluded that that is just never going to happen? Is it time to redraw boundaries in the Middle East in such a way that all these ethnic groups can feel like they have a “home”?

The World Without Us travels around the world to ask the question “What would happen if the United States was to leave the international scene, and become again a "normal nation", a republic, and not an empire?” Would it be good for the world? Or bad? The answer, of course, is “It depends on who you are.”

If you were a citizen of Taiwan, you might not like it. Unless somehow you think being absorbed into Communist China was going to serve your interest.

If you were a Jewish citizen of Israel, you probably would not like it. And indeed, if you were an Arab Christian citizen of Israel you might not like it.

If you were a wealthy citizen of Kuwait using your country’s oil money for nice cars or vacations in Paris you might not like it. Unless you had an inkling to be a citizen of an Iranian expansion franchise.

If you were Japanese, and had gotten used to living and thriving under an American defense umbrella you might not like it. The movie suggests that Japan would, no doubt, “go nuclear” as a deterrent to China.

If you were a citizen of South Korea, looking North at the Kim & Sons, Inc. million man “clone army” you would hope that America did not “go turtle” on you.

The film argues that even with all their criticism of the “big bad American empire” European countries dependent upon Middle Eastern oil would have a freakout if they had their own boys to the Middle East to defend the supply chain to it.

All of the countries of the world that depend on American policing of resources and supply lines are allowed to focus on other primary goals so long as they can, in the words of World Post writer John Feffer, if they “can hitch a free ride on the gas-guzzling, armor-plated American Hummer.”

Feffer doubts that the world needs American insurance against every Lord of the Flies Threat that it uses to justify its empire, but The World Without Us does an effective job demonstrating that in cases where America has NOT stepped in to put down every new psychopathic maniac, the rest of the world has rarely stepped up to the plate to do the job (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam, etc.) Is there a long line of critics signing up to do something about ISIS (ISIL) in Syria and Iraq?

Twelve years ago, Pat Buchanan argued in A Republic, Not an Empire that the United States had lost its way at the end of the Cold War and had fallen into a foreign policy controlled by special interests rather than by national self-interest. It had begun treating conflicts in the world like it used to treat domestic crime. Bad things were being done. America had to stop them. Particular voting-blocks or campaign contribution blocks were having their own special interests impacted by global disturbances or threats. American government was thus inclined to respond out of political expediencies. American military commitments were thus driven more by sentiment than budgets and the present national debt is where that has all led.

It is difficult to see where all this is heading. Americans may someday change their mind about their role in the world. We have done it before. We have had periods of “imperial overstretch” before and we have had periods of isolationist retreat as well.

If I were some of these places, I would at least have a white paper written up describing what my country’s “de-Americanization” strategy was going to be.

Question for Comment: American lives have clearly been impacted by the general global stability provided by American military presence in the world. Do you think it is time to just frack our own gas, grow our own food, make our own stuff, and let the world police its own energy supplies and trade routes?

08/10/2014

George Marsden begins his biography of Jonathan Edwards with a delightful comparison between Edwards and his contemporary, Benjamin Franklin. He notes how both men were faced with the challenges resulting from having been born into Puritan families in Puritan societies during an age of reason and enlightenment. It may however be important to note that both men were responding to what was, by the 1720’s, a compromised Purtianism, a Puritanism in which a minority of church members believed in a God of daily Providence and the belief of ministers themselves was by no means universal. “Franklin and Edwards responded to this juxtaposition of 18th-century British modernity in New England's earlier Puritan heritage in almost opposite ways,” Marsden writes,

“They represented two sides of the same coin in the emerging American culture during the era before the American Revolution.”

“Franklin embraced the progressive culture of his day with a vengeance, so much so that he forsook family, religion, and region to seek his own fortune. Edwards faced many of the same challenges but held onto the old faith. He did so not as a reactionary but was, like Franklin, an innovator.”

“To Franklin it seems self-evident that moral principles should be determined only by weighing the consequences of actions. For instance, in his autobiography, when he recounts his early attempts at reaching ‘moral perfection’ by following a list of virtues (such as frugality, industry, sincerity, and the like) he redefined the virtue of chastity in a way that allows for wide personal freedom: ‘rarely use venery [gratification of sexual desire] but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or injury of your or another's peace or reputation.’ Franklin thus participates in what became one of the most pervasive American traditions, one that countless people would use, as he did, to free themselves from religiously-based moral strictures of their various communities of origin.”

In some respects, American culture can be seen by looking down the broad path that Franklin blazed and the narrow path that Edwards blazed. In the approving words of historian Henry Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat [i.e. The French Revolution]."

In contrast to Benjamin Franklin’s move from a compromised Puritanism to Deism – a belief in a God that wound up the machine of the world and left it, Jonathan Edwards moved from that same compromised Puritanism to a Puritanism of direct experience of the divine in nature, the word, and community. Edwards’ move towards an ever-present God verges on pantheism by many estimates. “Whereas Benjamin Franklin by his early teens rejected this whole Calvinistic enterprise and ever after celebrated trust in himself,” since God was no longer an ever present “player” in his personal affairs, Jonathan Edwards aimed to bring American society closer to God’s emotional presence in their daily world. He sought to make his followers as acquainted with direct experience of God as the original Puritans claimed to have had during those death-defying days of the first settlement when deliverances seemed to arrive every day.

Marsden tells the story of the young Franklin looking for ways to eliminate the “inefficiency” of religion from his life.

“Always practically minded, the boy found the long and repetitious family prayers boring. So to save time he suggested to his father that he might bless the whole cask of salted fish at once, rather than praying over it every time it was served.”

“ … since the prayer isn’t heard by anyone really and doesn’t change anything really” is the implication. One can clearly see the influence of Newtonian understandings of natural laws in his loss of conviction about the efficacy of prayer. Ben Franklin was not inclined to think that prayers had any demonstrable result in a world governed by natural laws and physics. “Jonathan encountered these new ideas in a more controlled atmosphere,” writes Marsden of the fact that Edwards had to struggle with Newtonian implications in the context of a very” Puritan town. As the leader of its very Puritan church,

“but his recognition of their implications seems to have created a more painful struggle than it did for the teenage Ben, who was always ready to throw off any yoke that restrained him. Jonathan, shaped as he was by an intense and passionately pious family, was temperamentally disposed to hold onto the heritage of those he loved, but that made the intellectual challenge even more intense."

Edwards was forced to find the reality in his religion so as to not give it up and lose both his position, his status, and his family. Franklin simply gave it up. I find this insight to be intriguing. Franklin responded to his need to realign his beliefs by moving away from Puritan Boston and cutting ties with his family and connections so as to reinvent himself (perhaps there has never been a man more famous for his ability to invent). Jonathan Edwards, by contrast, moved right into the very heart of his family’s influence (Solomon Stoddard’s ministry in Northhampton) where he would have to redefine himself while connected to the very community that he could no longer belong to completely internally. Edwards had the harder row to hoe because he was trying to keep both his family and his integrity while Benjamin Franklin just got himself a newspaper and began “making” himself another family as it were. As Marsden puts it, “As a teenager Jonathan agonized all the more deeply over the state of his soul because it had deep emotional implications in relation to his family.”

Been there. Done that, Jon. As Franklin put God more and more at arm’s length, Edwards, drew God into the very flowers and fields and skies and atoms around him. If Edward’s God was to serve another generation of young people, he understood, He would have to be presented in viscerally present ways.

“Edwards now saw that the universe was essentially personal, an emanation of the love and beauty of God, so that everything, even in animate matter, was a personal communication from God. So in contrast to many contemporaries, such as Franklin who saw Newton’s laws of motion as providing the model for understanding an essentially impersonal universe, Edward started with a personal and sovereign God who expressed himself even in the ever-changing relationships of every atom to each other. This dramatic insight would be the key to every other aspect of his thought.”

But it was not simply in how Edwards and Franklin chose to see God’s presence or absence differently that demarked the two men. They also both set about to influence the ethics of their generations in different ways. They both sought to shift the tectonic plates under the ethical lives of the people they sought to influence.

“While in New York, Jonathan wrote an elaborate set of strict resolutions and begin keeping a diary that tracked his day-to-day efforts to follow them. Once again we can see both a parallel and a contrast to Benjamin Franklin, who similarly set for himself a list of virtues so that he could acquire good habits. Franklin's virtues were designed for self-fulfillment; Edwards were designed to subordinate his own will to God's will. As he put it in the resolution 43: ‘resolved, never henceforward, till I die, to act as if I were anyway my own, but entirely an altogether gods.’"

(Reading Edwards’ list of resolutions made it clear to me that the journal of Sylvanus Haynes that I have must have been written soon after his reading Jonathan Edwards.)

Edward’s spent his life trying to bring revival to the young people of America. Ethics for him was an essential prerequisite to pleasing God. For Franklin, it was about actualizing your potential as a human being for your own pleasure and profit. Franklin’s God would not make you holy. Nor was He necessary to make you virtuous.

When Jonathan Edwards was invited to participate in the work of his grandfather Solomon Stoddard in Northhampton, he would have been introduced to a church peopled with an entire spectrum of commitment. Solomon Stoddard had relaxed the standards of membership such that anyone in town who could affirm a belief in the church’s doctrines was accepted. They did not need to be able to articulate a conversion narrative to be allowed membership as the earlier Puritan churches had done. There was method to Stoddard’s madness, according to Marsden.

“In practical terms, by keeping the membership of the town and church more or less coextensive, Solomon Stoddard increased his authority over the entire town, making most of its citizens subject to the discipline of the church. Traditional Puritan that he was, Stoddard firmly believed that Christian communities in modern times stood in the same relationship to God has did Old Testament Israel. If the community kept God's laws, it would be blessed. If it blatantly defied God's laws, it would be punished by God's judgment. Hence, the more authority the pastor had in overseeing the morals of the town, the better off everyone would be.”

As a consequence of Stoddard’s relaxed membership demands and the ever growing population of young people in the 1720’s and 1730’s, a large group of restless youth in their 20s dominated Northhampton's “youth culture” says Marsden. Unlike their parents who could acquire new lands easily, these youth were “stuck” – trapped living in their parents’ homes for several years after their bodies started telling them to form families of their own. Having no land to give their children, the authority of fathers waned. Having no land to inherit from the fathers whose farms they worked, the sense of resentment in the children grew. “Jonathan later observed that when he arrived in Northhampton, young people were disturbingly out of control. In church services, for instance, they show disrespect for the once mighty Solomon Stoddard, by now enfeebled and nearly blind.”

In the Fall of 1727 an earthquake struck Massachusetts. Since it was customary for the young people of the town, after a long day of religious services, to congregate and stay late into the night for ‘frolics’ filled with mirth and ‘jollity’ the timing of the quake was Providential to Edwards. The earthquake, Edwards insisted the following week, was “not only a judgment on New England sins generally but likely was for more especially the sin that is committed on the a Sabbathday night.” Ben Franklin would not have made the connection, nor would he have argued that young people needed to be more continent out of a fear of tectonic plates shifting. Edwards’ preaching was calculated to impress upon young people the reality of God in their world (just as he would also preach that God’s beauty could be found in nature) and he took every opportunity (the early death of a young person, an earthquake, or a military victory in Nova Scotia) to make that connection real and viscerally felt.

Here is where I think Jonathan Edwards moved from being a local influence in Northhampton to being an international force. His description of the revivals in Northampton inspired English evangelists George Whitfield, and John and Charles Wesley. When those amplified revivals came to America, they came without Edwards’ need to stay “connected” to the ecclesiastical system that he and his family were so invested in. Whitfield came to Massachusetts and pulled no punches in his youthful criticism of the standing order and the Harvard and Yale trained clergy. Whitfield was part Beatles, part Elvis. part J.D. Salinger, part Jon Stewart, and part Socrates. The “youth of Athens” loved the way that he took the “elders” apart. Marsden says that “George Whitfield was the first celebrated star in an emerging popular culture that, lacking hereditary aristocracy, would be particularly susceptible to stars.”

Young people, and people young at heart, flocked to hear him for the same reason they loved Socrates in Athens. He offered a critical alternative to the elders and their status quo. For those that had always thought themselves religious but not religious in the way that their local ministers insisted they be, Whitfield was a “godsend.”

“Whitfield, even though he preached the same God centered Calvinist theology Edwards did, was ready to break man-made rules if it meant serving God better. . . . So it was that one principle of democracy – the authority of the common people – came to be realized in popular religion before it had widely emerged in the later politics of the American revolution.”

“Suddenly, official position or class carried no authority in religious matters unless one's soul was right with God. The simplest farmer who is converted could and should reject the authority of the most prestigious unregenerate clergyman.”

Edwards found himself trying to retain middle ground between the “Old Light” Calvinists who seemed to have so little to offer the youth culture that was so pervasive in 1740’s New England and the radical “New Lights” who seemed to think that Pentecostal enthusiasm need have no limits. What happened to Edwards is what often happens to people who try to retain a moderate middle between two extremes. He got crushed in the pincer movement. He had obtained popularity by defending the youth culture against the tarnished idealism of the old Puritan establishment (his speech at Yale did not overtly condemn the enthusiasms of the New Light revivals) and then he lost that support by being seen as someone who would not endorse the complete and utter surrender to the youth who wanted more emotional and ethical liberty than he was willing to extend.

“In Northhampton, Edwards’ instinct to support traditional authority was beginning to put him out of step with the emerging younger American culture in which many would question the old hierarchies.”

Historians refer to tipping point as the “bad book affair.” A dozen or two young men in Northhampton were using a book on midwifery to sexually harass young women in the community (recall that Edwards had seven daughters) and Edwards decided to bring the matter to a head by calling for a church disciplinary council. In announcing the list publically however, he failed to make a distinction between the accused and those who were merely witnesses. “Some Young people from leading families were in the latter group,” Marsden writes, “so that by the time parishioners got home from church much of the town was all ablaze about the matter. For many people, the matter was a case of youthful indiscretion. Edwards took an opposing view. These were not 15 year olds. They were young men in their early twenties who had been converted in his revivals and were thus, without excuse.

For Edwards, these children needed a good swift divine kick in the kiester. He made it clear that his acceptance of spiritual enthusiasms did not correspond to a wish for approval of other sorts of more carnal enthusiasms.

Marsden suggests that Jonathan Edwards’ seriousness about God was difficult for people less focused to maintain.

“Driven by his theological vision that a loving, faithful relationship to God was by far the most important thing in life and all other loves had to be subordinate to that, Edward set a standard of faith and practice that was difficult for most people to sustain. He himself was extraordinarily disciplined spiritually. He spent much time in regular prayers both privately and at set times daily with his family. He was said to spend 13 hours a day in his study. Such an exhausting regimen reflected both an extraordinary work ethic and intense spiritual discipline. He strictly regulated his diet, which he believed helped him work more effectively and preserve his delicate health. He looked almost like a monk in the midst of a busy world. For breaks he might Chop wood in the winter or ride in the summer into the countryside for reflection and spiritual contemplation. Not wishing to waste any time but finding it difficult to carry quill and ink, he would pin bits of paper to his jacket to remind him later to write down his most useful thoughts. He could sustain the highest standards of discipline for himself. But the standards could be daunting to others.”

Edwards’ best-selling biography of the missionary, David Brainard, conveyed to young people his high expectations for them all. But Brainard was a young man of deep religious sentiment and uncompromising consistency and courage that could either inspire or frustrate a “mortal.” (He reminds me of Brucho.) Ironically, two of the most widely read biographical works in the hands of American youth of the day would have been Franklin’s autobiography and Edwards’ Life of Brainard. Through much of the 19th century, Edwards' Life of Brainerd offered a model of the self-sacrificing person that competed with Franklins ideal of the “self-made man.”

Eventually, Jonathan Edwards could no longer live with the dichotomy between his personal convictions and the long established policy of his grandfather’s church. When Stoddard had instituted a more libral policy towards membership some 70 years before Edwards attempted to revoke them, they were a departure from earlier Puritan practice. Jonathan had learned to live with the policy but eventually decided to revert back to the more original but narrower definition of “Christian.” When he began insisting that new members needed to articular a credible tale of actual personal faith, his congregation reacted with their hackles up (and why wouldn’t they? He was, essentially, saying that if he could, he would “unmember” most of them.)

Again, he tried to be conciliatory. Marsden notes that

“Edwards wished something in between: new communicants would have to provide only a credible profession of heartfelt commitment, not an elaborate account of the conversions. This, he believed, was sufficient to protect the purity of the church while at the same time keeping membership open to all of the town who showed reasonable evidence of true conversion.”

The attempt led to his dismissal as pastr of the church. And consequently, he moved his family to stockbridge where he could work with native American Indians as Brainard had attempted to do. Perhaps he thought it best to work for the conversion of real “savages” rather than pew owning savages?

Ben Franklin seemed to have been content with his agnosticism and deism his entire life. “In 1790,” writes Marsden,

“just about a month before he died, Franklin wrote a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, who had asked him his views on religion:

'As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble ...”

Edwards died at the age of 55, just as he took over the Presidency of Yale College. Frankling lived for many decades more. Though Edwards' influence in American culture has always been among the minority (Evangelicals in particular), that minority has always been of the zealous sort that seems to never cease exerting influence. Here is the picture of Edwards’ place in the evangelical movement as Marsden sees it.

“Edwards starting point is that a loving God stands at the heart of the universe. So, for Edwards, the universe is most essentially personal; it is the creative expression of a person. Edwards’ emphasis on personality at the center of reality presents a sharp contrast to most modern views. Since the Enlightenment modern thinkers have built their theories on the premise that the universe is essentially impersonal, controlled by natural laws. Edwards challenge that view with the vital alternative: that the core of reality is a loving God, and that love is the dynamic behind the creation of the universe and everything in it.

"Starting with a sense of God's love at the center of reality then shapes the way we think of true virtue. At the core of reality is the beauty of the love of God pouring forth, so that the highest good is to return that love to God. If you truly love God, then we should also love what God loves, which is everything in creation, excepting evil within the negation of love. Modern philosophies, said Edwards, typically start in the wrong place, with humans and their needs. They see human happiness as the end of creation and then judge God by their limited standards. Each person, community, or nation has its own ideas of what will bring them happiness, and so people conflict with each other because their standards for virtue are too limited. Only true virtue, starting with love to the creator of us all, can bring people together. Edwards called this universal love for others that should grow out of truelove to God ‘love to being in general.’ His disciple, Samuel Hopkins, turned it into the more practical phrase ‘disinterested benevolence,’ [something that motivated so many of the missionaries that I studied in my Masters thesis] meaning that one should act lovingly toward others with no regard for one's own interest.”

“Jonathan Edwards is a towering figure among the founding fathers of the first American Revolution,” Marsden concludes, He was,

“the spiritual revolution of The Awakening. He was the Thomas Jefferson of that revolution, not only a leading philosopher but also a sometimes controversial practical leader.”

Question for Comment: If you were to read Edwards’ Life of Brainard and Franklin’s Autobiography, which do you think would inspire you more? Why?

08/06/2014

So, there certainly is a media war over the fracking debate that is - can I say this – heating up. In Gasland I and II, Josh Fox leads the viewer on a tour of fracked lives. Phelim McAleer responds with something that looks like a natural gas industry counterstrike (but according to McAleer, isn’t). McAleer ends his documentary with a shot of him being dragged, cameras, kit, and caboodle, out of one of Josh’s movie debut screenings. Josh ends Gasland II with some awesome footage of himself getting handcuffed and dragged out of a Congressional environmental hearing.

So, both sides of this issue seem to understand the need for dramatical pyrotechnics as a rhetorical device. The side for fracking insists that natural gas is a bridge fuel that can help us get a few more years of fossil fuel dependent living in before we HAVE to go sustainable. Josh Fox says that it is “not a bridge—it's a gangplank” [His words]. He argues that methane gas escapes into the atmosphere from frack-wells [My word] and that this methane is way worse than CO2 emissions when it comes to climate change. Here is what he says about these wells and methane.

“So 5 percent of these wells leak immediately upon installation, and up to 50 to 60 percent of them start leaking over a 30-year period. So in a couple of decades you have half of the wells that are drilled right now, and you're talking about numbers in the millions of wells drilled, leaking. That's a huge crisis in terms of water contamination. There's no way to fix that problem.”

Phelim McAleer counters that methane gas leaks into the atmosphere (and water systems) with or without the help of these wells. On this point, there doesn’t seem to be an argument. There have been places where you could light your garden hose on fire long before a gas well was installed next door. The fact that this was the case makes it difficult to prove that your water problem was created by the neighborhood well. And in the law, proof is the thing. If a hail storm wrecks your roof, your insurance company will pay for it if you can prove it was hail that wrecked it. But if your roof got wrecked by the expected abuse of Vermont winter year after year, they won’t. Phelim McAleer’s argument is that there is no proof of groundwater contamination caused by these wells. Josh Fox counters this with testimony by someone with lots of credentials that insists that the cement casing in these wells comes with inherent flaws. And if, as he claims, that cement sheath cracks, look out local ground water resources. Its inevitable.

So, what is needed here has to go beyond pictures of people lighting their garden hoses on fire. And it can’t rely on stories of people building homes that they have to sell because of contaminants in the air. What is needed is a thorough study of what the air was like BEFORE the wells started pumping and AFTER - What the water was like BEFORE the wells went operational and AFTER. And IF it is true that the problems in the water are caused by leakage in the well casings and IF it is true that these problems are likely to increase over time, it seems like we may find ourselves in fifty years wondering why we literally opened up a fissure into hell for ourselves or wondering why we didn’t just move people away from those areas where the energy we wanted was inevitably going to wreck the ecosystem.

Here is what I would like to see.

I would like to see a map upon which I can see where wells have been dug and where the actual people who are digging them are buying homes. I would like to see if the people making the money from these wells are living in downhill aquifers. I would like to see the highest levels of decision makers at the EPA regularly drinking coolaid made in Dimmock, PA. I want to see them regularly taking their toddlers on picnics into these homes of the humble that they are afeccting and giving those toddlers large glasses of water.

That would be the Solomonic test of truth for me.

Here is a map of the Marcelus Shale deposits that may be affecting energy prices in my area in the coming years.

Here are the new pipelines snaking their way into Vermont. Fortunately for us, we are sitting on marble, granite, and slate so, for Vermonters, this debate will be over just how willing we will be to buy the discounted gas that other people drill into their back yards for. Vermonters, as it appears to me, have always been willing to let other people drink the coolaide for us and I suspect we may continue despite the periodic protests.

Question for Comment: Would you oppose the drilling of a well near you? Would you support the importation of gas drilled elsewhere?

“There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.” – Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

Wajda is the first full length movie made in Saudi Arabia by a woman director. As there are no theaters in which to watch movies in Saudi Arabia, that is quite an accomplishment in and of itself. One has to love a movie that demonstrates its point in the way that it was made (Director, Haifaa Al Mansour, had to direct a good deal of it from the back of a van as men and women are not allowed to mingle in public in Saudi Arabia). Al Mansur’s 10 year old main character, Wajda, stands in for the director herself in many ways. She takes on the system with a rather sly, witty defiance that is impossible not to love. Wajda is part Mulan, part Margarette Fuller, and part Thomas Paine in her response to the attempts of her society to “put her in her place.” (“What do you mean, I can’t ride a bike?”)

What makes Wajda such a fine addition to the growing gallery of films about women’s rights in the Middle East (Baran, Offside, Secret Ballot, Osama, Kandahar, Persepolis,The Patience Stone, The Stoning of Soraya M., The Kite, etc.) is that it focuses more exclusively upon the place of the women who are complicit in the process of socializing their daughters into the system that limits them (in Wajda, her mother and her school principal). In an interview with The Financial Times, Al Mansour commented, “It was very important for me to show that even women reinforce traditional values and that it is not only men. The usual refrain is that the men are always the oppressors and the women are always victims, but the situation is more complex than that.”

I am reminded of a woman who wrote to the Caledonia Record (Vermont newspaper) a hundred years ago, expressing her opposition to the women’s suffrage movement.

Madame: I rec’d papers from you this morning, relating to womans suffrage. This is the way I feel about it. First I consider it an insult, and I think that a woman who will lower herself enough to want to vote, does not deserve to be called woman. And I sincerely hope that if they ever pass such a law that, (the women) no they won’t be women when they get down low enough to vote, will be compelled to pay a poll tax, just as much as the men. I should be ashamed to be called woman if the legislature ever gives women the right, that you want them to have, there will be nothing right or just about it. I don’t believe the Creator intended that woman should have that right. If a woman attends to her house duties as she ought too, that is enough lawmaking for her.

“The greatest weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” as someone once expressed it to me. Throughout the film, you see subtle pressures being put upon young women to suppress their talents and abilities. They are not allowed to actualize their potentials or accentuate their strengths. Wajda learns to make her way around obstacles in a way that bodes well for her future and shows just why it is that the world is always impoverished when people are forbidden to follow the line of their internal lights. “Catch me if you can,” Wajda says as she scoots her bike down the road at the end of the movie. Its like watching Frederick Douglas give his first speech.

One more thing: I find it interesting that the Surah h of the Qur’an that Wajda recites in the competition (something that she is doing simply to get the momey to buy a bike) is from the chapter “The Cow.” It is a piece that condemns those in Muhammad’s day who pretended to be believers but were not – who made themselves look like faithful Muslims but who were not in their hearts.

“Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over their vision is a veil. And for them is a great punishment. And of the people are some who say, "We believe in Allah and the Last Day," but they are not believers. They [think to] deceive Allah and those who believe, but they deceive not except themselves and perceive [it] not. In their hearts is disease, so Allah has increased their disease; and for them is a painful punishment because they [habitually] used to lie. And when it is said to them, "Do not cause corruption on the earth," they say, "We are but reformers." Unquestionably, it is they who are the corrupters, but they perceive [it] not.”

One could take Wajda’s performance of the Surah in either of two ways. One could argue that she is only pretending to be Muslim on the outside. Or one could argue that she is issuing a challenge to her society to be real Muslims. I tend to think Al Mansour has the later in mind.

Question for Comment: What stops you from putting your whole soul into your best talents?

08/05/2014

The British historian R.G. Collingwood insisted that the purpose of historical inquirey is to “get into the mind” of the subjects involved.

“The historian…is investigating not mere events (when by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event…His work may begin by discovering the outside of an event, but it can never end there; he must always remember that the event was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into the action, to discern the thought of its agent.

"So the historian of politics or warfare, presented with an account of certain actions done by Julius Caesar, tries to understand these actions, that is, discover what thoughts in Caesar’s mind determined him to do them. This implies envisaging for himself the situation in which Caesar stood, and thinking for himself what Caesar thought about the situation and the possible ways of dealing with it. The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind."

If one approves of this definition of “good history” it would be hard not to appreciate the significant contribution that Havard historian, Perry Miller, makes to our understanding of the colonial era in America for illuminating the mind of the Puritans that brought it about is what he does so immaculately. “I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history,” Miller says and as someone who finds how I think to be every bit as interesting as what I think, I could not agree more.

For the sake of space, I will reserve my review time to the analysis of just a few of the chapters from Miller’s Errand Into the Wilderness.

Chapter 1: Errand into the Wilderness

“Walt Whitman says, in a somewhat different context, that he commenced his studies, but was never able to get beyond the beginning.”

I confess that I have been tempted at times in my life to shuck off all my curricular obligations so as to spend an entire year of U.S. History wandering around the Puritan mind (Something Perry Miller spent his life doing.)

Miller asserts in his introduction to the chapter that he finds the subject of Puritan society endlessly fascinating. “I have never entertained the slightest ambition of making these ideas palatable to my contemporaries in any other sense than the historical one,” he says,

“There they are – those [thoughts] with which American thoughts began. Respect for them is not the same thing as believing in them – as Nathaniel Hawthorne preeminently demonstrated.”

First of all, what exactly did the Puritans believe about themselves when they thought about this crazy adventure they had set out on? Miller explains.

“What a due form of civil government meant, therefore, became crystal clear: a political regime, possessing power, which would consider its main function to be the erecting, protecting, and preserving of this form of polity. This due form would have, at the very beginning of its list of responsibilities, the duty of suppressing heresy, of subduing or somehow getting rid of dissenters – of being, in short, deliberately, vigorously, and consistently intolerant.”

How refreshing. We seem to take our self-righteousness today with heavy doses of hypocrisy that the Puritans simply could not digest. They were a people who knew they were right and refused to pretend otherwise. Puritan Massachusetts and later Connecticut saw themselves as having a mission – a contracted mission. And as Miller puts it, “Though there would be hard work for everybody, prosperity would be bestowed not as a consequence of labor but as a sign of approval upon the mission itself.”

“These Puritans did not flee to America; they went in order to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would quickly be accomplished if all the saints back there had any working model to guide them.”

The mission involved the creation of a model community that could and most certainly would work to reform English society down to its bones once it achieved its intended perfection. This high ideal (has there ever been a higher) is what caused the downright despair of later ministers who had to watch it wither, drop, and rot. Jeremiads, the name given to the sermonic wailings of disconsolate pastors,

“recite the long list of afflictions an angry God had rained upon them [Puritan children and grandchildren], surely enough to prove how abysmally they had deserted the covenant: crop failures, epidemics, grasshoppers, caterpillars, torrid Summers, arctic winters, Indian wars, hurricanes, shipwrecks, accidents, and most grievous of all unsatisfactory children.”

The list of short-fallings is pretty well complete by the end of the 1670s. Local ministers could use the template for their sermons and just fill in the outline with illustrative material gleaned from local observations. (See The Necessity of Reformation, 1679) Miller asserts that “there is hardly such another uninhibited and unrelenting documentation of a people's descent into corruption” in the whole history of the world. Unfortunately for the ministers, their congregants (required by law to attend the sermon) saw themselves has having paid hell enough by simply being there to be scolded and went right on doing what they were doing come Monday.

Alas, the fire burned hot but quickly in this wilderness. All too quickly, it appeared to those involved (those who got no pay for preaching jerimiads anyway) that God had somehow forgotten their mission (or at least forgotten to support it) A deus absconditus as Miller expresses it. But of even more consequence perhaps, England itself had made the original mission obsolete. For there, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell had taken over the reins of government and declared some model city on a hill in Massachusetts unnecessary. I love the way Miller expresses the demoralizing impact that this change of events in England had on Puritan morale.

“If an actor, playing the leading role in the greatest dramatic spectacle of the century, we're to attire himself and put on his makeup, rehearse his lines, take a deep breath, and stride onto the stage, only to find the theater dark and empty, no spotlight working, and himself entirely alone, he would feel as did New England around 1650 or 1660. For in the 1640s, during the civil wars, the colonies, so to speak, lost their audience. . . . There is nothing but tragedy in the realization that one was in the main path of events, and now is sidetracked and disregarded.”

True he has his own hardships – clearing rocky pastures, hauling in the cod during the storm, fighting Indians in the swamp – but what are these compared with the magnificence of leading an exodus of saints to found a city on a hill, for the eyes of all the world to behold? He might wage a stout fight against the Indians, and one out of 10 of his fellows might perish in the struggle, but the world was no longer interested. He would be reduced to writing accounts of himself and scheming to get a publisher in London, in a desperate effort to tell a heedless world, "Look, I exist!"

To the “man on the street” in this new New England, it must have seemed like a welcome reprieve. The home country no longer needed the great society that it had sent out the first colonists to found. Wonderful. There were economic opportunities aplenty that could just as easily use that attention and perhaps, with more reward. Thus did the colonies set to work on that other American “errand in the wilderness” – to get rich quick.

Chapter 2 Hooker and Connecticut Democracy

Vermonters often like to speculate on the differences between New Hampshire and Vermont (you do not have to wear a motorcycle helmet in New Hampshire for instance).

IT is hard to say whether or not the subject of this chapter will be as interesting to anyone who has never lived in New England but it is exploring just where it was in the history of the colonization process that Massachusetts and Conecticut started becoming two different places. “In terms of distance as then measured by communication,” Miller says,

“the [Connecticut River] valley in 1740 was more remote from the seacoast then Omaha is today from New York.”

Connecticut, as you all should remember from high school history classes, was founded by Thomas Hooker and the said Hooker was, as most textbooks describe it, a “dissenter.” Miller makes it clear that he was never so much a dissenter that his Puritan brothers in the Massachusetts Bay would have him exiled but … neither did they complain too much when he exiled himself. One of the principal differences that brought about the division, says Miller, had to do with the unwillingness of Mass Bay leaders to allow people who were not members of the church to vote. Here is what Perry Miller writes about this:

“Hooker, as his sermons attest, was vitally interested in the problem of conversion, and he saw the incongruency of excluding large numbers on the basis of their spiritual inadequacy when it was quite apparent that many were getting in under the ropes on false pretenses. His first reaction was an impulse to lower the standards for admission, so that even if more hypocrites were accepted, still fewer of the regenerate would be held out.”

In other words, Hooker believed that the State should still support the Puritan (Congregational) Church and its doctrines but … that State should somehow represent the views of more than just the elect as it did so. To put it even more succinctly, Thomas Hooker carried his Congregationalism into politics. Thus non-saints could elect non-saints into positions of power in Connecticut though, once there, they would be required to promote the interests of the saints. “All of which is to say, once more,” says Miller,

“that there was an irrepressibly democratic dynamic in Protestant theology, though all good Protestants strove to stifle it.”

Chapter 3: The Marrow of Puritan Divinity

At the heart of this chapter is an argument that Puritan theology was not simply Calvinism transplanted. Over the hundred and fifty or so years after John Calvin published his famous Institutes, defining the beliefs of the new Protestant movement, theologians and ministers of the Puritan tradition modified and adopted the fundamental tenants to their own needs and creative wishes. “There had come to be numerous departures from or developments within the pristine creed,” writes Miller, “and Calvinism in the 17th-century covered almost as many shades of opinion as does socialism in the 20th.” (Miller wrote in the mid 1900’s.)

Dr. Miller explains that John Calvin’s great work did not set out to explain Protestant theology coherently so much as to simply articulate all of the things that must be true, if one was to base their belief on the Bible. Calvin was perfectly willing, if Bible verses dictated, to assert things that he could not explain or reconcile. Take Predestination. Calvin writes:

“To desire any other knowledge of predestination and what is unfolded in the word of God, indicates as great folly, as a wish to walk through on passable roads, or see in the dark.”

And yet it would be the Puritan ministers who would have to somehow make sense of those very things that Calvin was willing to say “don’t bother trying to make sense of.”

“Calvin may with titanic effort marshal [doctrines] in the form of a coherent logical pattern, but each individual item rests, in the final analysis, not upon the logic of its place in the system, but upon the specific and arbitrary enactment of God. “The object of our faith, as far as His personal character is concerned” Calvin could say

“is an utter blank to comprehension; He is a realm of mystery, in whom we are sure that all dilemmas and contradictions are ultimately resolved, though just how, we shall never in this world even remotely fathom.”

But how does a minister in New England apply that to a man whose son has just been struck dead by a fallen tree or whose wife has been “murthered” by Indians? This is where the New England Mind really gets its first assignment Miller seems to suggest. A minister like John Preston for example, brought “the schools into the pulpit, and unshelling their controversies out of their hard school terms, made thereof plain and wholesome meat for his people."

This was where the concept of “the covenant” came to the rescue and in many ways, defined the New England community as distinctly “American.” “Perkins, Ames, Preston, and Sibbes are clearly the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts,” writes Miller, in introducing the importance of the covenant in helping lay Puritan men and women understand their inscrutable Calvinist God.

“Pursuing this logic, these men broached one of their most daring ideas: if a man can prove that he has faith, he has then done his part and can hold God to account, hale him into court and force him to give what has become the man's just and legal due: you may sue him of his own bond written and sealed, and he cannot deny it.'"

Preston says “this is a very comfortable doctrine, if it be well considered.”

And indeed it was. For it meant that God was not entirely capricious and even though He might be impossible to understand entirely, He had made Himself understandable enough to live with. As Miller says,

“The covenant made it possible to argue that while God elects whom he pleases, he is pleased to elect those who catch him in his plighted word, and that it is up to Fallen man to do so.”

“Certainly the implacable mystery celebrated in the institutes has become materially transformed by the time he appears as the God of the covenant. He may still be essentially unknowable, but he has told enough about himself, and betrayed enough of his character, so that he is not an utter blank. His eternal purposes are still sealed secrets, but in the covenant is given us more than a glimpse of their direction.”

Most Puritan ministers were excited to have thus served their flocks. But in time, the doctrine would create its own rip-tide of skepticism (something felt deeply throughout New England even to this day) for, as experience was laid down upon experience, it was not discovered that the clear one-to-one correspondence between righteousness and riches actually, in fact materialized. Nothing may doom a person’s trust in a covenanted God more than the feeling that one has worked harder to keep the conditions than God has. Over the decades, more and more Puritan children began to wonder if the covenant keeping God their ministers had promised them was merely the ephemera of self-deluded theologians. “It was Jonathan Edwards,” Miller concludes the chapter, who

“went back to the doctrine from which the tradition had started; went back, not to what the first generation of New Englanders had held, but to Calvin, and who became, therefore, the first consistent and authentic Calvinist in New England.”

P.S. Miller asserts that John Preston’s sermon, The new Covenant, or the Saints Portion published in London in 1629 is essential reading for understanding the Puritan mind.

Chapter 4: Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia

How fascinating. Before the Puritans of Massachusetts even started on their mission, the Puritans of Virginia had already tried it and given up.

Miller starts his chapter with this paragraph:

“As I have remarked, children of the New England tradition – especially those who more recently have devoted themselves with conspicuous success to finance rather than to theology – are unhappy when reminded that their ancestors were so impractical as to be worried about religious matters. Those of the Virginia tradition, however, are confident that from the beginning only material ambitions of empire, profit, tobacco, and real estate occupied their pioneers. Historians who think exclusively in terms of economic incentives are relieved when they turn from New England, with its annoying proclivities for theology and polity, to a Virginia where no such nonsense supervenes.”

“In fact,” says Miller, “professions of Virginia adventures sounds much like those of Massachusetts Puritans, however heretical this may appear to modern Virginians!” The chapter goes on to document in meticulous detail all the evidence for the Puritanical origins of the “first” Virginia settlement. “Planters and promoters,” Miller argues, “present themselves as only secondarily merchants and exploiters, only secondarily Englishman; in their own conceptions of themselves, they are first and foremost Christians, and above all militant Protestants.”

See John Rolfes letter to Sir Thomas Dale for a great example. Rolfe had recently fallen in love with the Powhatan princess, Pocohantas and was writing for permission to marry her. The letter, as Miller demonstrates, reveals a man who has to see the decision in theological terms if he is going to see it at all.

“To discover a courtship conducted in this spirit beside the James [River] is to realize that however much Virginia and New England differed in ecclesiastical polities, they were both recruited from the same type of Englishman, pious, hard-working, middle-class, accepting literally and solemnly the tenants of Puritanism–original sin, predestination, and election – who could conceive of the society they were errecting in America only within a religious framework. In the fullness of time, the differing church polities of Virginia and New England became institutional dresses for diverging characters, but at the beginning the two had much in common.”

To the first settlers of Virginia, and by all accounts these were not the best of Puritans,

“events were not produced by the blind operations of cause-and-effect, economic motives, or human contrivances; these were second causes through which God worked. The First cause was always his will. He decreed whether the much-needed supply ships would founder or arrive, whether Powhatan should be friendly or hostile, whether corn should grow or rats consume it, whether Virginia was to succeed or fail.”

The promotional literature of the Virginia company was constantly trying to lure in godly settlers (God knows they knew that they were in desperate need of a higher quality man than they were getting in the first boatloads) by insisting that the mission to Virginia was a Holy mission. Set backs and losses were constant and no investor could look at investment in this company as “a sure thing” without some recourse to faith in the almighty’s commitment to it. In any event, the company assured it stockholders, "it is but a golden slumber, that dream of any human felicity, which is not sauced with some contingent miserie. Grief and pleasure are the cross sails of the worlds ever turning windmill."

Over and over, the promoters kept reminding potential investors that they had to put God first to get money out in the end (“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you,” the Sermon on the Mount insisted. “We may acquire riches only if we do not set our hearts upon them.” “There is indeed an assured hope of gain in the business,” they promised potential pilgrims to the plantation, “but look it be not chief in your thoughts.”

But it was. What seems evident to me is that the first settlers in Virginia were not of the same exact material in their spiritual commitments as those who settled New England. Promoters of the Virginia company insisted that their plantation had spiritual purposes in mind foremost but they never insisted that their early settlers had those exact motives in mind.

“Though he might summon a few exceptional saints to Virginia by an inward motion of conscience, God lured the majority by economic hopes and further prevailed upon them by assurances of success. ... The desire for wealth, the opportunity to procure it, the ships in the tools, England's need to Virginia's commodities, these were all stratagems within the providence of God to make certain that the Gospel be carried to America.”

“Official publications of the company fused the divine and earthly by pointing out that the action concerned God, and the advancement of religion, the present ease, future honor and safety of the kingdom, the strength of our navy, the visible hope of a great and rich trade, and many secret blessings not yet discovered.”

In short, the persons recruited for the mission were only serving its ends unconsciously.

That may have been a problem.

Indeed it was a problem. And in the absence of an internal commitment to the spiritual and communal cause, the Virginia company had to try sending dictators to rule the place.

“If we have resolute governors and preaching of the word, we need not worry about the "generalitie", they argued.

“since even the most disordered, if you will, the very excrement, of a full and swelling state, put under firm discipline in a new country, wanting pleasures and subject to some pinching miseries, will become new men, good and worthie instruments and members of the Commonwealth.”

This was wishful thinking. Eventually, the company had to try and lure people to Virginia by promising them, not a greater portion of God or of wealth, but of liberty to make their own laws. Capt. John Smith bluntly expressed it, "No Man will go from hence to have less freedom there than here."

But even this effort failed. I leave you with an extensive portion of Perry Miller’s analysis of Virgina, God and the future of the American dream.

“By 1624 the company was in a worse state than 1619. The king dissolved the corporation and took the colony into his royal charge, but nobody knew what was to be done with it, or how, in the name of the king or of heaven, it was to be conducted. The vast structure of propaganda collapsed; demonstrations of Virginia's role in the scheme of Providence were refuted by stubborn facts, and the holy edifice was a ruin. The dissolution of the Virginia company was a momentous event in the intellectual history of modern Europe, but none at the moment realized the implications: it was a turning point, not because a tyrannical king triumph over a liberal Sandys, but because it shattered the immense conception of the colonial impulse which the Virginia writers had constructed in terms of a medieval, hierarchical, providential universe. They had dedicated Virginia to a special sanctity, to a divine designation in terms of a teleological reading of human history.

Now, despite these assurances, it was overthrown, but not by slow and almost imperceptible evolution, such as that through which the Massachusetts Zion was subtly transformed into a mercantile society, but by a dramatic failure which, in implication, overthrew the entire ideological rationalization.

In spite of every exertion, the staples could not be produced; in spite of every restraint, tobacco was planted. The weed alone offered any return to the stricken planters. Officers and ministers might fulminate and invoke the cosmic plan, assuring settlers that if they would hasten the iron and glassworks and restrain the quantity of tobacco they would inevitably prosper: pioneers had perforce learned a different lesson. In 1623 a hostile critic reported that the projects for glass and iron were abandoned, that when the pamphlets in which Sandy's set forth the grandiose claims of the colony arrived in Virginia, they were laughed to scorn, and every base fellow boldly gave them the lie in diverse particulars. In simple fact, the glorious mission of Virginia came down to growing a weed: tobacco only was the business and for ought I could hear everyman madded upon that and little thought or looked for anything else.' When he took over the leadership, Sandys himself condemned tobacco and promised more respectable products; the assembly was to be his means of getting them. Now he was convicted of failure, and the assembly, instead of being his dream, was his defeat. The cool-tempered Francis Bacon, whose detachment from the prejudices of his day is always terrifying, moralized in a secular vein a century in advance of his contemporaries, that 'before we plant colonies we might speculate less about the will of God and more about what the soil will actually yield.',

Liberty in abundance, not having been the aims of the apostles, should not be sought in Virginia. Well, now the company was fallen, the college wiped out, the missionary spirit dead; Providence seem to clearly to call upon men in Virginia not to emulate the apostles but to seek liberty and abundance, especially the great abundance that could be procured if the price of tobacco remained at five shillings a pound."

The dissolution of the company changed Virginia from a holy experiment to a commercial plantation. Even before Massachusetts Bay was settled by people who believed still more rigorously in the ideas of Providence, the covenant of grace, and the means of conversion, who set out more deliberately to create a holy commonwealth, Virginia had already gone through the cycle of exploration, religious dedication, disillusionment, and then reconciliation to a world in which making a living was the ultimate reality.

The love of liberty that Virginia would eventually come to be known for in 1776 and beyond was, in some measure, born of the fact that a company had failed to succeed by trying to lure England’s most religious and had opted to lure England’s most liberty loving. Democracy, says Miller, was as abhorrent to the founders [of Virginia] as to King James, and if anything of their doing subsequently worked out to be advantageous to the democratic idea, this was entirely beside their intention.”

Chapter 5 the Puritan State and Puritan Society

In this chapter, Perry Miller takes on the subject of church and state relationships in Puritan Massachusetts. He begins it thus:

“In order to understand Puritanism we must go behind these 18th century developments to an age when the unity of religion and politics was so axiomatic that very few men would even have grasped the idea that church and state could be distinct. For the Puritan mind it was not possible to segregate demand spiritual life from his communal life. . . . “

“The Bible said and experience proved that since the fall, without the policeman, the judge, the jail, the law, and the magistrate, men will rob, murder, and fight among themselves; without a coercive state to restrain evil impulses and administer punishments, no life will be safe, no property secure, no honor of observed. Therefore, upon Adam’s apostasy, God himself instituted governments among men.”

Thus we should not be surprised to find what we do find in Puritan church-state relationships. “To allow no dissent from truth was exactly the reason they had come to America.” As Miller puts it,

“The government of Massachusetts, and of Connecticut as well, was a dictatorship, and never pretended to be anything else; it was a dictatorship, not of a single tyrant, or of an economic class, or of a political faction, but of the holy and regenerate. Those who did not hold with the ideals entertained by the righteous, or who believed God had preached other principles, or who desired that in religious beliefs, morality, and ecclesiastical preferences all men should be left at liberty to do as they wished – such person had every liberty, as Nathaniel Ward said, to stay away from New England.”

A few hundred miles south of New England’s sandy shores and righteous communities of conforming saints, William Penn decided to try something new: a colony dedicated to the proposition that conscience could be allowed to police private opinion. "Force may make hypocrites,” Penn wrote to Lord Arlington, while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, “but it can make no converts," a sentiment only recently articulated by my dear old ancestor, Roger Williams.

Chapter 6: Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakeningand Chapter 7: The Rhetoric of Sensation

Just two more chapters covered together. You will have to check it out and read the rest yourself.

“I am ready to say,” says Miller,

“that the great awakening was the point at which the wilderness took over the task of defining the objectives of the Puritan errand. I am the more prepared to say this because Jonathan Edwards was a child of the wilderness as well as of Puritanism.”

In these two chapters, Perry Miller tries to explain Jonathan Edwards and the Second Great Awakening. I confess, he merely whetted my appetite. Chapter Seven in particular goes deeply into the philosophy of John Locke (deeper than most readers are going to want to follow me) and shows how Jonathan Edwards modified Locke’s theory to spark an Elvis-plus-Beatles-sized transformation of American religion in the 1740’s.

Because it is not entirely clear to me yet how he did it, it is difficult to explain, and so I will leave you with the most relevant passage from the chapter to think about yourself.

“For Berkeley it led inescapably to a stylist injunction: ‘Whatever ideas I consider, I shall endeavor to take them bare and naked into my view;’ for Edwards, acceptance of the sensational psychology was a commitment to a lifetime of effort, to ‘extricate all questions from the least confusion of ambiguity of words, so that the ideas should be left naked.’"

“To excite the actual idea of certain realities, of the love of woman or the fear of God, for example, does indeed put us to 'trouble.' It was precisely here that Edwards went beyond Locke, Far beyond him! He reached into a wholly other segment of psychology, the realm of the passions, and linked the word not only with the idea but also with that from which Locke had striven to separate it, with the emotions.”

“I am not afraid to tell sinners, that are most sensible of their misery,” said Edwards, “that their case is indeed as miserable as they think it to be, and thousand times more so; for this is the truth.”

Like Elvis – Like the Beatles – Jonathan Edwards figured out a “voice” that, when heard, made you feel something that you had always known about. Next book, I believe will be a biography of J. Edwards. Can’t wait to get to it.

Question for Comment: Puritans were convinced that the government they set up had a divine responsibility to a divine mission. Do you think that your government does? If so, what?

08/04/2014

Commentators have suggested that Alexander Hamilton built America’s institutions with a clear-eyed yet unflattering understanding of human nature. Jefferson, his arch enemy and political opponent, was always more popular because he was gifted at providing the American public with a rosy picture of itself and the world. But no government built entirely on Jeffersonian beliefs would have actually lasted in Hamilton’s opinion (or mine). As Chernow notes, Jefferson succeeded with the government that Hamilton built. Jefferson could have never built it. He could only benefit from it (though perhaps the opposite is also true?) Jefferson, the critic of just about every policy Hamilton ever expounded, took the reins of office in 1801 with a sound federal government, with a high credit rating, a navy, a coast guard, a unified country, and a flexible constitution. Jefferson also inherited an executive branch that could respond to crisis, a rule of law and a culture of capitalism that could function without a great deal of governmental interference, once started. Jefferson borrowed money for the Louisianna Territory with a credit score Hamilton had built. Jefferson succeeded with Hamilton’s nation state and basked in the glory you might say. Chernow, it should be noted, leans towards Hamilton in the never-ending debate between historical fan clubs of these two men.

Chernow’s biography is extensive and provides the student of American history with the historical context that created the man who graces our ten dollar bills and haunts out present government in Washington and economy in New York City.

One cannot help but be reminded of how American politics is built to amplify distortions when it gives us images of political leaders. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson could accept that the other was something less than the caricature they created of each other. Perhaps it is always easier to win an election or a political battle if the opponent can be made to look like Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler. Ancient emperors and kings would win their thrones by physically eliminating their opponents and it is, perhaps, naïve to think that present day elections are any less bloody (though instead of killing rivals to the throne in democracies, those rivals simply get their reputations assassinated). Jefferson had to cast Hamilton as a aristocrat-loving monarchist of the highest order. Jeffersonians saw Hamilton as the evil genius monarchist British agent and a snobbish tool of plutocrats and a potential military Napoleonic despot. Hamilton reciprocated by casting Jefferson as a guillotine-toting Jacobin mob-thug for a similar reason.

This biography took about 37 hours to listen to on Audible so condensing it to something blog-worthy will be a challenge. I think the best approach is one that distills just what it was that turned this orphan from the Caribbean into one of America’s most influential framers. Alexander Hamilton was born an illegitimate child to a rather dysfunctional family on the island of Nevis in the leeward Islands of the Caribbean. “Not bad enough for the gallows and yet too bad to live among their virtuous countrymen at home” is what one minister said of Nevis’s inhabitants. Though Hamilton’s Scottish ancestry through his father would have given him the notion that he had it within him to succeed, he seems to have gotten his brains from his mother. Throughout his life, his brains and his confidence would combine to create an astounding record of accomplishment. From his early reading in Plutarch’s lives, Hamilton learned that individuals were capable of great things. From Nevis, he acquired a radical pessimism about human nature and the masses that never left him.

Between 1765-1769 Hamilton tasted from a grim catalog of disasters that had befallen him. He and his brother’s father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. Hamilton was fourteen when he found himself orphaned, homeless, and penniless. He took a job as a clerk in a local trading company and never looked back, cashing in one experience after another in developing an evolving resume that would eventually bring him to the pinnacle of power in what would become the world’s greatest superpower.

“How did he do that?” One might ask. I would like to suggest the following as the “Hamiltonian recipe for world conquest.”

Start by having at least one significant talent. Alexander Hamilton started the ball rolling by taking on a job as a young teenager that demanded talent. He began exhibiting a habit of accepting responsibilities that knew he would have to grow into. Throughout his life, he would locate himself in jobs that would force him to summon his abilities up to the level of his potential. In his very first job as a clerk in a trading company, young Alexander was learning much about economics, trade, smuggling, accounting, and the importance of knowing how to read, calculate, and create usable statistical data. An examination of Hamilton’s career will testify that he took on tasks that men with far more years would have thought daunting. In every case, he invested the time needed to educate himself to the task. Chernow refers to him as a “natural autodidact” (a self-teacher).

The second piece of advice thatHamilton’s life might give us is not necessarily within our control to make happen: “Live in significant times and be in the vicinity of the time’s most significant events.”

“I wish there was a war,” Alexander Hamilton said in a letter to a friend as a teenager. He understood that any chance he might have of getting off his isolated backwater island would have to involve outside events conspiring to give him opportunity for his ambition. His boat was ready but it needed a high tide. Throughout his life, Hamilton capitalized on the fact that he lived in propitious times and always managed to make his way to the vortex of them. He found a way to attend school in New York City at the heart of a booming new economy and a paradigm shifting revolution. During that war, he made his way to the center of its decision making nucleus by taking on the responsibilities of primary aide de camp to George Washington. At war’s end, he saw to it that he would be involved in the creation of the new nation’s constitution at Philadelphia and when the Constitutional Convention was deciding whether or not to ratify that Constitution, he made himself the central interpreter of its terms in The Federalist Papers. Finally, when the new constitution went into effect, he embedded himself in the most vital cabinet post of its first and most formative administration. Hamilton was like a kayaker on a river that never allows himself to be out of the center of the fastest current. As Chernow puts it, “Hamilton materialized at every major turning point in the history of the republic.”

To use the analogy of surfing, Hamilton scored high partially because he is a very good surfer and partially because he never seems to have missed the biggest waves. One might argue that he had a genius for seeing them before everyone else, or creating them when they did not exist.

A third piece of Hamiltonian advice is one that Chernow notes on several occasions: Become useful to significant people.

Hamilton always seemed to impress older men with his abilities, Chernow says, George Washington included. Beginning with the impression that he made on Nevis’ influential minister (an impression that earned him a scholarship to university in New York), Hamilton always had an eye towards choosing his mentors and patrons well and he came to them prepared to impress. While attending college in New York, Hamilton signed up to be an artillery officer in the local militia, gearing up to defend the city from the British invasion he was sure would come. But he also led the way with his rhetorical abilities, articulating more clearly than anyone in New York why Independence should be fought for and won. In a short time, what he had to offer came to the notice of significant men in New York (his future father-in-law, General Phillip Schuyler for one and George Washington for another.) Hamilton was twenty-two when he was appointed an aide to Washington and his life would be thereby forever changed.

Washington’s cynicism about human nature jived well with Hamilton’s and Hamilton could serve as Washington’s more verbally gifted muse. “It is hard to imagine Washington and Hamilton without each other,” Chernow argues, Washington knew Hamilton needed a steadying hand. Washington needed Hamilton to create plans and the two of them were “far more than the sum of their parts.”

Washington lacked “verbal flow” says Chernow, but nevertheless, had to deal with an unending flow of paperwork and this is why Hamilton was so important to him. Hamilton was an incredibly fluent writer, capable of putting Washington’s meanings into effective written form. The challenges of running the Continental army were such that Washington sometimes needed people to “think for him” – people who could mimic his brain while he slept. Hamilton was a godsend because he could project himself into Washington’s mind; “an inspired act of ventriloquism” as Chernow phrases it. Thus, most of Washington’s orders are written in Hamilton’s writing. Understanding the General’s intentions and predispositions better than anyone, in time, Hamilton began giving Washington advice and by the age of twenty two, he was used to drafting letters and orders in Washington’s name, and he was well on his way to acculturating himself to the world of high-level big-stakes decision making.

It is worth noting as an aside that Hamilton often detected flaws in Washington less detectable to other aides and though but an apprentice to the General, Hamilton could no doubt visualize himself running the army. He knew Washington was a person of irreplaceable gifts and never forgot that but he learned by watching, mimicking, and doing. Whether they liked him or disliked him, the great men of Hamilton’s day were never unfamiliar with him nor he with them.

If I were to add to my list a fourth lesson from Hamilton’s life, I would suggest to anyone wanting to achieve what Hamilton achieved that they take the time to understand what the most significant problem of their era is. I suspect that most of us lead rather mediocre lives because we spend those lives trying to solve irrelevant problems. Hamilton seems to have had superior powers of perception in that regard. He seems to always see the important in the overwhelming static of the mundane.

Even while in the Caribbean, Hamilton could see the social problems created when men were left free from moral and governmental coercion. He saw the way that some men suffered from excessive freedom (his father being one) and how other men used it to treat their fellow man with excessive cruelty.Hamilton’s apprenticeship exposed him to the value of cash, credit, and trade and he understood how policies were at the heart of the establishment of an economy where people could thrive. He understood smuggling and he saw the problems of a singular economic policy in agricultural (sugar). These things would later cause him to understand before any of his contemporaries, the importance of an American navy and a diversified economy (agriculture and manufacturing). He also would have seen many slave ships and he would have understood clearly the ways that slavery threatened the lives of both the owner and the owned. “Hamilton carried a heavy dread of disorder and came to detest the tyranny of planters while fearing the uprising of the slaves,” says Chernow. He understood that the primary problem of his age would be to find some balance between despotism and anarchy, the Siamese banes of human existence.

While serving on Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War, Hamilton understood clearly that the national army was being crippled by lack of central political power over finances. Hamilton understood how weak the colonies were because they had no stable currency and had no home-based manufacturing. Valley Forge taught Washington and Hamilton lessons about the need for national power that neither ever forgot. He could clearly see that Americans had not solved their problems with the Articles of Confederation and he devoted himself to finding a real solution to the problem of union.

During the war, Hamilton also saw that leadership talent was being drained off by the states and that the U.S. army and government was being beggared to staff the state militias and legislatures. He was only twenty three but Hamilton saw the national character and credibility threatened by lack of power to raise funds and thus, to raise a credible military presence in the field. Finally, Hamilton saw that England could raise foreign loans in wartime and he saw how critical that was for a country interested in taking advantage of opportunities when they presented themselves. He understood that a national government with bad credit was a tremendous temptation to outside aggressors who had the sort of credit that could raise revenue at the moment of a competitor’s weakness.

Chernow draws a picture of Hamilton always looking ahead and seeing threats with sudden flashes of insight that were typically (but not always) spot on. This may well be why Chernow argues that he became a casualty of his own success, for as Washington noted the old-souled wisdom of his young aide more and more, the conviction grew on him that could not let him go despite Hamilton’s desire to take a field command and show his metal in that more masculine and less secretarial way.

But it was not simply Hamilton’s ability to define the core problem of his times more clearly than others that gave the young colonel the edge. Hamilton combined this gift with an ability to articulate a significant plan for dealing with it.

To put it crassly, Hamilton saw that England was winning the war because England had money. He saw that America had to make England’s hopes look sketchy to its creditors if they were to have any hope of winning eventually. He understood, perhaps better than anyone else on Washington’s staff, that England had to be defeated in the bond market as much as or more than on the field. He understood that the significant power that England’s ability to borrow when it needed was as much an advantage as its navy’s ability to deliver men and material to any port on the Atlantic seaboard. And he wanted those powers available to his government as soon as possible.

At the age of 25, before the war was even over and many years before the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton argued in a series of letters entitled “The Continentalist” that the national government had to be strengthened. In these letters, he demonstrates that he was always focused on problems that were going to be coming next and he was always formulating action steps to deal with those problems.

The plan Hamilton called for involved acquiring the State’s tax collection monopoly. For several months after his military service was over, he took a job gathering taxes so that he could learn even more about what would need to be done. He understood that the National government had to have its own funding system. It had to have Federal customs and tax collectors. Otherwise, the Federal government would always be the beggar-boy of the States. Ironically, it was this very task of raising money for the army that gave Hamilton and Madison a shared a common belief in the need for a stronger federal government. Both had been involved in the funding of the Revolutionary War and both saw the problems that the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation were causing the national honor.

We can also see Hamilton’s ability to plan profoundly demonstrated in his blueprint for winning the ratification debate. While his political opponents (the state’s rights faction) generally left the matter to a diffuse campaign of haphazard support, Hamilton organized the best writers of his party to create the “Federalist Papers” – a veritable fusillade of terse arguments on every Constitutional point worthy of debate. One might argue that Hamilton planned the Federalist argument like one might plan a military campaign to defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown. He left nothing to chance. Hamilton supervised the entire Federalist project. It was his idea. He wrote most. He supervised the publication and saw to it that it got published by the right people in the right quantities in the right places.

And yet, the greatest demonstration of Hamilton’s ability to formulate workable solutions to problems will have to be seen in his various reports to Congress as Treasury Secretary. His report on public debt, his report on manufactures, his plan for the U.S. Mint, and his report on a national bank all betray his Bill Belichekian genius for system building. He wanted to actualize America’s potential to “play with the big boys” and at every level, he can be seen achieving those ends with his policies and systems.

“He invented the machines to accomplish the ends of the framing thinkers. Jefferson was the poetry. Hamilton was the prose. He crafted the mechanisms that bound the union together.”

But it is not enough to come up with a plan. You have to be able to articulate that plan in a way that can win it the support it needs of people in power. Few people could rival Hamilton in his ability to articulate his plans with significant and consistent force. Jefferson, by contrast, was far better at phrasing an ideal than an actual plan for reaching it.Chernow paints Hamilton as an administrative genius, a thinker and doer -A system builder – theory and mechanics were equally possible for him, he says.

Chernow calls Hamilton “a Niagra of opinion” and insists that he always wrote “with the speed of an organized mind.” “Anyone competing with Hamilton on paper,” Hamilton’s nemesis, Aaron Burr once wrote, “was lost.” He wrote in the midst of controversy with the greatest accumen. And often, it seems, he required opposition to give his thought force. Alexander Hamilton seems to have been a voracious reader and he read widely. He understood, perhaps in a way none of his contemporaries did, the need for leaders to understand economics and not just politics. “No other founding father understood economics like he did,” Chernow tells us. Certainly, none had his ability to make an economic argument. He understood that there was a direct connection between money and power and he was unrelenting in making that case. To get those contemporaries to shake off their fear of political power, he had to get them to understand what he had learned about money. His various reports to Congress do exactly that. We know that he succeeded because whenever he wrote, both the people who stood to gain and the people who stood to lose, understood him and reacted appropriately.

Hamilton argued that America needed to make itself independent of outside manufacturers and won the debate.

He argued that slavery was both immoral and economically detrimental and, in the North, won the debate.

He argued that though America should encourage meritocracy, it should not be hereditary and he won the debate.

He argued that the Constitution, though flawed and though short of his own hopes for a government of great centralized power, was entirely capable of improving the lives of every American and he won the debate.

He saw American as successful so long as the best Americans were in control of it. And for over a decade, he won the debate.

Hamilton saw the need for a central bank to collect and direct to the greater economic good, the nation’s money. And he won the argument.

Hamilton argued for a robust system of taxes and tax collectors and he obtained them from Congress by his arguments.

Hamilton argued for vigorous internal enforcement of laws and vigorous external protection of national interests, and he got them.

Hamilton argued for the assumption of the State’s debts so as to build American credit and wed the “loaning class” to the interests of the Federal government and he got his way.

Hamilton argued for taxes on whiskey and he got them.

Hamilton argued that everything depended upon maintaining trade with Britain despite the many provocations for war with that country and during the years of his influence, he won that argument.

Hamilton argued in favor of the Jay Treaty with England, much to the chagrin of the populace and still won the argument.

He argued for monies to be set aside for absconding with British industrial secrets and he got them.

He argued for a stable money supply overseen by a robust treasury department and in answer to his argument, he was rewarded with a staff larger than all the other departments combined.

Hamilton argued that the Constitution empowered Washington’s government to do whatever it needed to do to accomplish the ends that the Constitution made the government’s responsibility (loose construction), and despite Jefferson’s strident opposition, Hamilton carried the day with the President on that issue – and did so to the point that Jefferson eventually was forced to resign.

Hamilton often “buried his foes in arguments” Chernow notes. It is perhaps testament to the power of his rhetoric that his opponents often had to resort to attacks on what Hamilton did not say when attempting to overcome his writing. “Lies grew up around Hamilton like choking vines,” Chernow insists. He was brilliant, confident, and liable to be a lightning rod because of his powers of persuasion. His ideas had power therefore, long after he was no longer there to nurture and shepherd them.

In time, even his former teammate in the Federalist papers, James Madison had to defect from their original partnership for fear of what Hamilton might accomplish with his rhetorical gifts. Neither Jefferson nor Madison ever really found an antidote to Hamilton’s influence while Washington was President.

According to his biographer, Hamilton was fourty when he left Philadelphia. The Whiskey Rebellion was suppressed. His integrity was vindicated. The Country’s finances were flourishing. He had sponsored the bank, assumption of public debt, the coast guard, the tax service, the custom service. His financial system had totally restored the country as having one of the world’s best credit ratings. He had transferred the power of American government to the executive and he had defended Washington’s administration and annunciated key points of foreign policy. He had clarified Constitutional interpretations. Hamilton’s achievements were never matched. Even his critics, used his systems to accomplish their ends later.

Hamilton collected enemies right along with each and every success but only some of his accomplishments of persuasion were ever torn down. Most were simply modified. “Hamilton is a colossus,” Jefferson once wrote Madison. “He is an army or multitude within himself. … There is nobody but yourself who can meet him.”

In the end, Jefferson and Madison would have to resort to proxies and unrelenting (and vicious) press campaigns to take him out of their way to their own experiment with power. “Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion” Hamilton had said in 1802 after the Jeffersonians had taken power on a wave of public sentiment. It seems to be Chernow’s belief that Hamilton could only be defeated by bullets and an appeal to something deeper and more powerful than reason, the “politics of hope.”

It would be a mistake to conclude from all the above that Hamilton came to the world of American politics lacking nothing for success. Chernow never lets us forget the flaws of his central subject. This biography is not hagiography. We learn of Hamilton’s inability to compromise. We learn that he could sometimes imagine phantoms that were not there and see slights where they did not exist. We learn of Hamilton’s sordid affair with a young 23 year old coquette by the name of Mariah Reynolds and her extortionist grandmaster husband, James. We learn of Hamilton’s propensity to “shoot himself in the foot” by thinking that excessive meticulous arguments were always the best response to criticism of his ideas. We learn of Hamilton’s obsession with his personal honor and we learn how the same led to both his own death by duel and the death by duel of his oldest son, Philip.

We also learn how Hamilton could sometimes be so right as to blind himself to the fact that sometimes, even a right can be half wrong. Perhaps I will wrap up this review of Chernow’s biography with the controversial story of Hamilton’s argument for assuming State debt and paying off national debt at value.

During the war, the national government had often had to pay for supplies and soldiers with IOUs. These notes were diminished in value during and after the war as it appeared that the Federal government would never pay back the notes at their stated value. Many of the soldiers, desperate for cash to pay their taxes after the war, sold these notes for cents on the dollar to speculators. Hamilton’s leaked plan to pay the notes off at value with new taxes inspired many speculators to scour the backwoods for soldiers with notes that could be purchased at bargain prices and later redeemed at value. Tremendous sums of debt were thus transferred to those with ready cash and a knowledge of what was coming.

When the bill calling for the National government to pay these speculators for their notes was debated, Madison argued that there was something patently unfair about patriotic soldiers struggling to pay taxes and land debt getting almost nothing from the promises made to them while already wealthy bank speculators rolled up huge gains simply because they were “connected” to Hamilton’s information feed. “At least give the men who sold those bonds to speculators any monies that might accrue to their worth AFTER the bill was passed” Madison insisted.

Hamilton took a hard line on this issue however. He wanted America to be known as a place where contracts would be upheld and sales notarized would be final. He wanted investors to know that what America promised when it signed an IOU would be paid to the people who trusted that it would. Speculators had banked on the integrity of the United States government and the soldier-sellers of the bonds had not. Tough luck for them. It was not the government’s job to protect anyone from their own bad deals (It would be interesting to see whether he would have bailed American banks out in 2008).

It is not hard to see how easy it was for Jefferson to rail against Hamilton as an elitist and to cudgel him with accusations of aristocratic privilege mongering. Towards the end of Washington’s Presidency, Hamilton devised a whiskey tax to raise funds from the backwoods sector of the American economy that would balance out the funds already being raised through the tax levied on incoming goods in Eastern ports. To Hamilton, the fact that Western States were being defended with Federal troops entitled the government to tax western commerce. As with any tax, it was unpopular among “the masses” that drank whiskey and used it as a mechanism of currency. It is not hard to see how easy it was for Jefferson to beat Hamilton over the head with his decision to enforce the tax with military force (like Eisenhower at Little Rock or Nixon at Kent state). The fact is that American society had become a democracy. That was the reality and maybe for the first time in his life, Hamilton turned out to be mostly right while ignoring reality.

In the end, Chernow concludes that Hamilton may have been too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. People do not want a leader so far above their heads, he proposes. “Hamilton regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics. Be optimistic when addressing the electorate.” He was incapable of flattery. Ultimately, Hamilton could not offer incense to the people’s self-image quite like Jefferson could and the election of 1800 combined with the utter disarray of Hamilton’s Federalist party is conclusive proof of it.

Question for Comment: Alexander Hamilton insisted that American lives would be improved if the American government assumed more and more of the prerogatives of local government. This of course is an argument that made sense when HE was the principle architect of that central government’s policies. Is there a quintessentially right wing or left wing answer to the question of how much power the central government should have? Or does it just depend whether or not your particular agenda is ascendency there?